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Gold turquoise and shell ear ornaments, Moche culture, 1-800 AD

Truncated text of tweet from MrPitBull, Mar 11, 2026:

She kept finding women in laboratory photographs from the 1800s. Then she read the published papers—and every single woman had vanished. Someone had erased them from history.

Yale University, 1969.

Margaret Rossiter was a graduate student studying the history of science. She was one of very few women in her program.

Every Friday afternoon, students and faculty gathered for beers and informal conversation. One week, Margaret asked a simple question: "Were there ever any women scientists?"

The faculty answered firmly: No.

Someone mentioned Marie Curie. The group dismissed it—her husband Pierre really deserved the credit.

Margaret didn't argue. But she also didn't believe them.

So she started looking.

She found a reference book called "American Men of Science"—essentially a Who's Who of scientific achievement. Despite the title, she was shocked to discover it contained entries about women. Botanists trained at Wellesley. Geologists from Vermont.

There were names. There were credentials. There were careers.

The professors had been wrong.

But Margaret's discovery was just the beginning. Because as she dug deeper into archives across the country, she found something far more disturbing.

Photograph after photograph showed women standing at laboratory benches, working with equipment, listed on research teams.

But when she read the published papers, the award citations, the official histories—those same women had disappeared. Their names were missing. Their contributions erased.

It wasn't random. It was systematic.

Women who designed experiments watched male colleagues publish results without giving them credit. Women whose discoveries were assigned to supervisors. Women listed in acknowledgments instead of as authors. Women passed over for awards that went to male collaborators who contributed far less.

Margaret realized she was witnessing a pattern that stretched across centuries.

Women had always been present in science. The record had simply pushed them aside.

She needed a name for what she was documenting.

In the early 1990s, she found it in the work of Matilda Joslyn Gage—a 19th-century suffragist who had written about this exact phenomenon in 1870.

In 1993, Margaret published a paper formally naming it: The Matilda Effect.

The term captured something that had been hidden in plain sight for generations. Once you knew the term, you saw it everywhere.

Her dissertation became a lifelong mission.

For more than 30 years, Margaret researched and wrote her landmark three-volume series: Women Scientists in America. She examined letters, institutional policies, individual careers. She gathered undeniable evidence that women in science had been consistently under-credited and structurally excluded.

Her work faced resistance. Many dismissed women's history as political rather than academic. Others insisted she was exaggerating.

Margaret didn't argue emotionally. She presented data. Documented cases. Patterns repeated across decades and institutions.

Eventually, the evidence became undeniable.

Her research helped restore recognition to scientists who had been erased:

Rosalind Franklin, whose X-ray work revealed DNA's structure—credit went to Watson and Crick.

Lise Meitner, who explained nuclear fission—omitted from the Nobel Prize.

Nettie Stevens, who discovered sex chromosomes—received little credit.

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, who discovered stars are made of hydrogen—initially dismissed.

And countless others whose names had nearly vanished.

Margaret changed the narrative. Science was no longer just the story of solitary male geniuses. It became a story of collaboration that included women who had been written out.

There are a number of tells, but this is an excellent example to talk about em-dashes, which people often either take as permanent AI tells or run the other way and say "humans use em-dashes and that's why AI does, too! they're not tells!" Both are kind of right and both are kind of wrong.

What you'll see if you look closely at this text is that it ONLY uses em-dashes. Every time it needs to put in some kind of break or set off some text, it goes for the em-dash. There are no phrases in parentheses. There are commas, but only in places where the absolute rule is to use a comma (like in a series, for instance). There is one colon, again placed where the absolute rule is to use at (at the top of a list). Whenever there's an option, where a human writer would be actively making a choice about what punctuation to use, the AI defaults to an em-dash.

On top of that, look at the content. The AI bot people are obsessed with feminism, ironically. I suspect it's because very basic feminist narratives about women pushing back against barriers or doing something heroic are popular and gets shared widely. So, first of all, you should be on your guard when you see a "what this woman did CHANGED HISTORY!" kind of piece. (I wonder if the twitter/tumblr trend of BUCKLE UP history posts has affected the AI ...) And then you should check out the specific claims.

She kept finding women in laboratory photographs from the 1800s. Then she read the published papers—and every single woman had vanished. Someone had erased them from history.

I can't find this anywhere else. The paper "The Matthew Matilda Effect in Science" doesn't talk about photos! The Wikipedia page doesn't talk about photos! This Smithsonian article doesn't talk about photos! Her piece on her career in Writing and Revising the Disciplines (2002) (good read) DOES mention photos, in that she got the Mount Holyoke archivist to send her a few from the 1880s showing women doing scientific work as a nice illustration that "epitomized" what she was already aware of.

Rossiter started with textual primary sources that documented women as named individuals contributing to scientific discoveries. The idea of her being confused by photos is a hallucination.

Despite the title, she was shocked to discover it contained entries about women. Botanists trained at Wellesley. Geologists from Vermont.

There's definitely something to be said about the framing of this bit as shocking!!! but since I'm talking about facts and sources, it's clear to me that the AI recognized the botany-Wellesley connection from the paper but could not parse that the reference was to a female botanist who taught at Wellesley. There is also nothing in the paper about Vermont geologists, so I have no idea where the AI got that; I would suspect it's another hallucination attempting to create a pattern from the first reference.

But Margaret's discovery was just the beginning. Because as she dug deeper into archives across the country, she found something far more disturbing. Photograph after photograph showed women standing at laboratory benches, working with equipment, listed on research teams. But when she read the published papers, the award citations, the official histories—those same women had disappeared. Their names were missing. Their contributions erased.

Again, back to the mysterious photographs. But the rest of this text is an issue as well: what Rossiter describes in the paper is not a complete absence of these women in any official documentation, but that these women were amply documented and known to be working within the scientific community and yet did not receive public credit or awards. It's not a complete smothering out, but a sort of complacent back-burnering, which is too nuanced for the AI to be able to handle when told to "write a post about the Matilda effect that will get engagement on social media". She didn't prove that discoveries attributed to male authorship actually had women involved and only she knew their names: she collected many stories that people already knew of overlooked/underplayed female scientists and put them together to say, "This is a pattern and we should have a name for it." Some of her examples were even recent enough (1970s-80s) that she was able to point to a feminist backlash.

And again ironically, the AI itself engages in the Matilda Effect by presenting this whole thing as utter silence -> Rossiter gets curious -> the case is blown open. Rossiter actually refers to the work of other female historians and social scientists! In fact, she started this line of research after noticing the female biographies in American Men of Science when her housemate, Cynthia Thompson, recommended that she keep track of them.

Her research helped restore recognition to scientists who had been erased: Rosalind Franklin, whose X-ray work revealed DNA's structure—credit went to Watson and Crick. Lise Meitner, who explained nuclear fission—omitted from the Nobel Prize. Nettie Stevens, who discovered sex chromosomes—received little credit. Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, who discovered stars are made of hydrogen—initially dismissed. And countless others whose names had nearly vanished.

Rossiter did not claim to be rediscovering these women. She refers to Franklin and Meitner as having been famously denied credit, in fact! Meitner specifically is "one of the best-known examples of the phenomenon". Stevens she uses as one in the list of examples in the paper, and Payne-Gaposchkin actually just gets a reference at the end that's doesn't even tell you the specific field of scientific study. (To be fair, there may be more about them in her other publications.) This was not about Badass Historian of Science Tells the Establishment What's What. Everybody knew about the concept of female scientists being publicly ignored as collaborators by 1993 — and women's history as a field had been around for 15-20 years. She was not working in a vacuum where nobody else thought that it was important to study these topics until she forced them to see the light.

but a different missing scientist that doesn't appear in the text of the tweets, Dr. Jocelyn Bell Burnell.

also, I think it's fascinating (read: typical, disappointing) that not a single one of the scientists mentioned in the LLM content wasn't white. Like say, Marie Maynard Daly, who did pioneering work in heart disease and cigarette smoking:

Jewel Plumber Cobb, one of the first to study what would later be termed "precision medicine" or how different people respond differently to chemotherapy in oncology:

or Chien-Shiung Wu, experimental physicist and Manhattan Project contributor.

and lest anyone think I had to dig hard for this information somewhere obscure, all three of these examples are from a single article in Smithsonian magazine, on the first page of results in DuckDuckGo (non-AI version). Literally less than a minute to find.

On the 17th of July 1936, the fascists in the Spanish army started a coup against the democratically-elected Republic government in Melilla (one of the Spanish-controlled cities in the coast of Northern Africa). This coup spread to the Iberian peninsula the next day, July 18th. Catalonia was one of the places with a strongest resistance (together with the Valencian Country and Madrid city), which managed to stop the coup in their homelands thanks to the workers' antifascist organisations (anarchist, pro-Catalan, and communist unions, parties, social centres, and other grassroots organisations).

From the places where the coup had been successful, the fascists kept trying to expand their dictatorial rule through military invasion of everything they considered should be Spain, met with resistance. This is how the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) was started.

With the emergencies of war, workers saw the need and opportunity to create an equal society based on the principles of anarchism. Factories and farms were collectivised, luxury hotels and restaurants were turned into shelters and community kitchens, and the mansions of the bourgeoisie and nobility who were fleeing to fascist-controlled areas were shared by working class families. The hope, cheerfulness, and conscience of collaborating with the creation of a better future for all is what explains why people look so happy in the photos taken in the earliest days of the war in Catalonia. Workers excitedly took up arms to go fight against fascism and assist the creation of the future.

The other European countries signed a pact of no intervention, saying that it was an "internal affair" and they would not assist the legitimate democratically-elected government against the army who wanted to impose a fascist dictatorship. Hitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy violated the pact and strongly helped Franco, trying out new weaponry (specially aerial bombing of civilian villages, towns, and cities) for the first time, techniques which some years later they used against the civilians of those same democratic countries who had refused to help fight fascism, during the Second World War (1939-1945). The only country who gave some help was the USSR, but with nowhere near as much involvement as the fascists. Still, thousands of antifascist volunteers came to join the International Brigades.

The war was very unequal when it comes to the resources, weaponry, and international support of its sides. In the end, the anarchist dream of an equal society with respect and dignity for all came to an end with the fascists' victory in the war, giving way to a nightmare 40-year-long fascist dictatorship that killed, jailed, and tortured the opposition, where speaking leftist ideas set a danger to your life, where speaking our languages (Catalan, Basque, Galician, Aranese, Asturian) was forbidden, where the imposition of Catholicism and women's control was absolute. A regime of terror and psychological control that has left many of our older relatives still unable to speak of parts of their life without breaking down.

We have never recovered from everything that was lost. The lives, the hopes and dreams that were cut short, the children that were stolen by the dictatorship and the Catholic Church, the interiorized self-hatred of national minorities where many have been left to believe we have no place in the modern world and must completely assimilate and abandon our culture for the supposedly superior Spanish one, the workers' organisations' buildings and libraries and budgets that were given to the Church or burned down, the records of our history and language and literature that were purposely destroyed, the trauma always present in the ones who were arrested, tortured, publicly humiliated, even the children beaten by the teachers for being heard speaking their mother tongue. The institutions that are still inheritors of the fascist ones: police, judicial system, the main Spanish political parties, the companies whose owners are as rich and powerful as they are because of their implication with the dictatorship. The way that Spain is, still, a fascist state.

And yet, the memory of the Social Revolution has lived on, same as our language has. Sometimes whispered at home or at clandestine meetings, sometimes shouted in the squares and recklessly at the police at the torture cells. It has inspired people all around the world. Now, with a global rise of the far-right again which has also reached here and many young men turning to it, it is a time to remember what happened, what can be done, and what we cannot ever let happen again.

LEVERAGE: REDEMPTION, 1.7 THE DOUBLE-EDGED SWORD JOB

ab. 1545 Netherlandish School - A diptych: Portrait of a gentleman of the van Zuudt family and Portrait of a lady of the van Heinsberghe family

OH ENTIRELY! the photo below is what I’ve been using for a lot of interviews, and it was taken peak-dying. I had a lot of extra lines around my eyes from them being kinda sunken